A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and other products for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Popular nonfiction has not yet entirely been taken over by the stunt book -- all of those things written by authors who vowed to live in a chicken coop, or eat only vegan food, or eat a '57 Chevy, or do some other odd thing, every single day for a whole year -- but they're infesting the category like kudzu, and are as difficult to eliminate. Jonathan Bender, a features writer from Kansas City, swims against the tide with his first book, which follows the old paradigm of popular nonfiction: go out and investigate this interesting thing, and then come back and tell us about it.

In Bender's case, that interesting thing is the growth of adults who build with LEGO bricks -- please, Bender and all of his subjects cry, don't call them "LEGOs," since that's not the correct jargon! -- particularly the communities they form and the neat things they build. Along the way, of course, Bender finds himself becoming an AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) himself, but who expected otherwise?

So Bender goes to the gatherings of adult builders -- Brickfest and Brickworld and BrickCon (one begins to see a pattern in these names) -- and visits LEGO world HQ in Billund, Denmark (and, later, the US HQ in Connecticut, conveniently near his childhood home for thematic purposes), and the LEGOLAND theme park in California. Along the way, he meets a lot of men (and only a tiny handful of women) whose hobby is to build models or new creations from little squares of plastic, and quickly wants to become one of them. (Bender also has a subplot -- which I forgive for its lack of subtlety because this is a nonfiction book, and so presumably it's all true -- is that he and his wife Kate have been trying to get pregnant -- to have kids of their own to play with -- with no success so far.)

Lego was published by my employer, so I'd avoid saying negative things about it even if I didn't like it -- but I've enjoyed LEGO myself (mostly with my kids in recent years) for ages, so Bender's explorations into the world of adult builders (and many of their frankly awesome creations, documented in photographs in the book) was a real treat. I don't think a reader has to like LEGO to enjoy the book -- it's another "here's an interesting subculture" book, like Candyfreak, with the additional interest that these guys are hobbyists who make neat things. (And LEGO creations somehow seem less pointless than buildings made out of matchsticks, for example.) It might not turn you into a brickbasher overnight, but The Wife brought home two big LEGO sets (supposedly for Christmas gifts) last night, which she got really cheaply, and I'm beginning to wonder who actually will be the one to put them together....Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index